expense list, page 12

panama, san blas

Miffed and scorned by the boat-wielding Panamanian public (my plan to sail the Canal as a line-handler never materialized), I re-directed my last few Central American days to San Blas, a string of islands off the coast that, along with a 232-mile strip of coastal Panama, belongs to the indigenous Kuna people.

It was an odd and incredible experience that I have yet to wrap my head around. Far from any trace of urban armatures that could possibly rationalize such a side trip, my days on the islands were some of the richest of the year. This is not the least because I got to share them with—in addition to the Kuna—the two Irish architects and an entirely impressive UCLA business student that filled out our gaggle of gringos.

Our visit was remarkable for time as well as place. A prominent islander happened to have a daughter going through her first menstrual cycle. Now, ordinarily this isn’t a fact to which I’d be privy but for the Kuna it calls for a celebration including a haircut, a naming, and an island-wide celebration.

The celebration that ensued would never fly at Disney. First the women and then the men proceeded to get absolutely sloshed on traditional sugar-cane liquor and rubbing-alcohol-grade rum. Drunken scuffles interrupted the ceremonial dances while children darted everywhere like a school of skipping, clapping sardines (not the canned kind; the swimming-in-the-ocean kind). It seemed to be an important moment of release, especially for the women, whose social role appeared more structured in terms of dress and behavior. The girl’s newfound adulthood served as little more than a pretense for the party and we visitors never actually even saw the special girl amid all the revelry.

It astounds me that the Kuna were as comfortable with us in their midst as they were. As a people, they retain their traditions with uncanny self-awareness and open-mindedness. They seem to take money with a grain of salt—until recently, coconuts served as currency—and a modest tourism trade garners sufficient cash for whatever modern conveniences they deem appropriate. There’s nothing like a native on a cell phone or Linkin Park in the hut next door.

Part of San Blas’ magic was the odyssey it entailed. Our crew woke up at five, followed a three-hour highway schlep from Panama City with two more hours of mud-slinging jungle adrenaline (top image) and, after out-juking a team of oversexed Caterpillar trucks, we headed to the river. Settled in our canoe, we floated down past crocodiles and toucans until the river spilled into the sea and delivered us to our final destination, a low sandy island barnacled by thatched huts (bottom image). There we slept on hammocks and dined on more crab and lobster than we could eat, spending most of the day on deserted islands with powdery beaches and palm trees (middle image). I may have sacrificed a few layers of skin and a few gallons of perspiration but the pay-off, I dare say, was tremendous.

panama city, miraflores locks

Image and footage of a ferry in transit...the ship is a flea compared to the usual freighters passing through. The widest of ships leave a mere two feet to each of the locks' walls. I'm going to try to hitch a ride up the canal as a "line handler" in the next few days before I move on to Colombia. I realize that the Panama Canal doesn't quite fall in line with the other case studies I've adopted so far in terms of scale or urban interaction...but it's damn interesting and impressive so I'll just stick it in the BF Infrastructure category for now and have a good time with it.

It doesn’t organize Panama City with small-scale sophistication (it's more like a raison d'etre) but, for such a gargantuan gesture, the Panama Canal seems surprisingly ambiguous. It is not the Lay-Z-River Sharpie slash that I imagined. Instead, the canal is a nexus of infrastructures—from dams to locks to railway lines to freight vessels—that relies on an intimate relationship with Panama's topographical and ecological peculiarities.
I happened to visit during the rainy season, which means chronic dampness and oppressive humidity. Such weather isn’t conducive to daytime activity (nightlife is another story), but the canal depends on this inordinate amount of precipitation for its viability. Daily deluges descend on surrounding swathes of spongy jungle. Dense root networks minimize soil erosion and corresponding dredging requirements. From rain forested slopes, water coalesces in Lake Gatún, an artificial lake 26 meters above sea level that is maintained by three dams. This lake stores the water needed for all the lock operations. There are no pumps. The Panama Canal’s locks operate gravitationally to flush about 26 million gallons of freshwater into the Pacific and the Atlantic per use. As long as the reservoir isn’t overtaxed it’s an incredibly efficient system…and one that is about to get more efficient when a more sophisticated and water-saving set of new locks are completed in the next few years.

mexico city, zócolo demonstration

I'm still not completely sure what the people were protesting....something about the government taking the shirts off their backs....but I certainly admire the group's pluck. It was coming down pretty hard at the time. The Zócolo is Mexico City's main square and one of the largest civic plazas in the world. The red square in the image at top indicates where they were and the video below should explain the rest.

mexico city, centro historico

The image above, scanned from Benevolo's History of the City, overlays the original Aztec city (left) and the subsequent Spanish grid (right) on Mexico City's center as it stood in the 1970's.
Mexicans are entrepreneurial masters of sidewalk and subway. The city feels oddly European—even American—in its structure and organization but the way in which its standard communal spaces are inhabited can be completely different. For example, in the metro one is passed by a steady tattoo of small-time sales(wo)men. At high tide there may be one hawker per car, although rarely do they allow themselves to overlap. Most sell CDs (pens, gum, and DVD’s are other favorites) and as they shout out tracks and titles they blare their wares from small speakers in their knapsacks. I have found that Mexican volume, at least in its commercial capacity, is twice as loud as the typical color scheme. Above ground, space and sunlight allow for more flexible salesmanship. About half of the average walkway width is taken up by informal venders…no matter how narrow that sidewalk may be. The images above depict two views of a particularly striking downtown street that goes so far as to color-coordinate itself. In the image on the right, you can see how dense the corner becomes before pedestrians can cross the street. The pressure is so intense that I came close to getting intimate with a bus when I was in their position.

mexico city, tlaltelolco

Right next to the Plaza of the Three Cultures (so-called because of its indigenous, Spanish, and contemporary architectural constituency) there rises a host of high-rise housing developments stranded in neglected greenspace. A suspended pedestrian roof winds through the site, held aloft by orange frames. It’s almost as if someone connected the dots in Cristo’s Gates project. Although the intervention does distract from the scene's general banality and provide a thunderstorm service, it doesn’t exhibit any of the other capacities that have marked other similar projects I’ve seen. It appears to be a mono-functional, circulatory gesture more than a spatial, organizational, or structural armature.

mexico city, xochimilco

The image shows one of the Xochimilco’s garden-lined canals originally coaxed—and still cultivated—by organically landfilling an ancient lake. The right side of the canal has been shored and concretized but the left bank remains in its original earthen form. The trees growing along the bank were planted to prevent aqueous erosion. Their densely netted root structures act as an effective landscape cloth. Let me call your attention to the festooned flotillas you might have missed floating in the foreground, each with a built-in table, room for fifteen or twenty, and an oversized paper mache faceplate on front. I imagine the scene would be a bit more active if I had come during the weekend. The boats number in the thousands. Unleashed, they must be an awesome sight. Finally, in the distance undulate the impossibly thin concrete curves of Felix Candela’s Los Manantiales, a restaurant constructed in 1958. This building haunted my structural engineering lectures for years but I never quite understood how it sat in the landscape. It’s under renovation at the moment but I did manage to scramble under its petals for a quick snap-happy look around.

mexico city, casa luis barragán

Luis Barragán, an engineer-cum-architect with a love for both modernism and Mexican dwelling, inhabited and periodically redesigned the house from 1948 until his death in 1988. Visitors are supposed to set up an appointment to get in but I stumbled upon its stoop just as an American tour group had arrived. They were more than happy to share the experience….and their impressions along the way. Note the personal testimony halfway down the stairs. The house was impressive for Barragán’s daylighting techniques, his sophisticated interior-exterior relationships, and his remarkable ability to exploit ostensible solidity for scenographic effect. It is an essay in the phenomenal potential of pared essentials.

mexico city, issues of scale

The image to the left pairs a totemic monolith with a modern onlooker at the museo nacional de antropología. While the museum’s extensive collection runs the gamut, pre-Columbian sculptors seem at their most impressive when operating in stony solidity. It is a monumental sensibility shared by their architecture. The image to the right depicts the ruins of Teotihuacán, a massive pre-Columbian capitol. Rising from an expansive valley, Teotihuacán uses orientation, geometry, and a sublimely hubristic scale to embed itself in the panorama. Views are carefully considered. I took the photograph from atop the so-called Temple of the Moon, which stands at the head of the city’s wide central corridor. This corridor continues for an indeterminate length toward the distant hills. To its left, slightly set back, a massive pyramid referred to as the Temple of the Sun geometrically regularizes its mountainous halo. The minor pyramids scattered at its feet cement the geologic analogy. Touting their power with acoustical response, the precinct’s ancient planners created a grand gesture of which even Le Corbusier would be proud.

uc berkeley, branner midterm report

elkin, the ballard estate

I am in North Carolina again until July 3, basking in southern humidity and parental hospitality while I parse the infinite and profound lessons of my ongoing international investigation. Since the sorting has so far been the frustrating opposite of instantaneous, I try to spend as much time outside as possible QT'ing with my dog and reveling in the bliss of a perpetually available washing machine. This image is of an interim project to the north of my parents' house: bounding some previously planted bushes and roping our arbor into the gently rising hillside.

selected video segments

Some colorful cuts culled from a couple of the more cogent clips I could collect since cutting out of the country...

selected sketchbook pages

A few of the more legible (to me, at least) European sketchbook pages, freshly scanned and occasionally relatable to the grand scholarly scheme.....

Corbusier's cabin and gravesite in Cap Martin, France

Villa Savoye in Poissy, France

Notre Dame au Haut in Ronchamp, France

Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, Italy

Laurentian cloister and sculpture in Florence, Italy

Artwork from Rijksmuseum and Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, The Netherlands and from Leopold Museum in Vienna, Austria

Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista in Venice, Italy
Ca' d'Oro in Venice, Italy

The Peristyle in Split, Croatia

Wiessenhof Siedlung in Stuttgart, Germany
Olympic Park in Munich, Germany

north carolina, lake norman

The joys of coming home: a typical conversation with my best friend's son, Penn.

expense list, pages 8 - 11

poissy, villa savoye

A final Corbusier project before heading home for a spell....

paris, promenade plantée

*This map, scanned from National Geographic of October 2006, plots Paris' extensive park system. I have highlighted my objects of inquiry, Place des Vosges and the Promenade Plantée, in red.

Designed by Jacques Vergely (landscape architect) and Philippe Mathieux (architect), the promenade is a 2.8 mile elevated park in Paris’ 12^th arrondissement that extends from Opera Bastille to the eastern city limits. It reinhabits a 19^th century railway viaduct abandoned since 1969 and has inspired several United States parks-in-progress including the High Line in New York, the Bloomingdale Trail in Chicago, and the Reading Viaduct in Philadelphia.

I took the three images above from the promenade’s primary section, called Viaduc des Arts. Here the park perches above broad supporting arches filled with arts and crafts workshops, visible in the image at right. The image at center captures the typical condition above: a wide, paved path with periodic resting points engulfed in an overwhelming explosion of greenery whose novel vantage surrenders cinematically screened city views. Panoramas appear when a wider street must be spanned and the viaduct section correspondingly thinned, as on the image to the left. Note that, in the right and left images, the smaller promenade plants naturally conform to the street trees’ height, reinforcing the raised relationship to and urban unity with the Parisian street life below.

paris, place des vosges

*the place and its context cropped by a 1,500' x 1,500' frame. Lines in red represent building plans I have collected thus far.
The plaza, originally Place Royale, was designed by Baptiste du Cerceau under Henri IV and completed in 1612. Behind a unified façade punctuated by the king and queen’s axial personal pavilions, individual properties were given loose rein. Hence, a host of architects participated in the development’s realization despite its single-hand appearance.

In Collage City, Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter refer to Place des Vosges as a “stabilizer”, a spatially-centering structured enclave anchoring a larger locale. The square’s grand geometric void stands out against the small-scale row houses and small palaces of the surrounding Marais district, grounding and centering small-scale landowner and home-owner operations in a clearly ordered pattern.

Though the Place is not connected to a major urban artery it does yield one of its sides to a minor throughway, shown in the image to the left. Here, to the north, the place’s façade lies flush with the Parisian fabric, its residential depth embedded and its loggia capped by flanking storefronts. Without the three other walls off-camera to the left, this royal construction could seem to be but a pleasant private development.

The image to the right shows two of those other walls and the family-friendly park space they surround, chaperoned by fountains and foliage. Green seems to do more in Paris than it does elsewhere. Here, a dense, nearly continuous belt of green three trees deep buffers encircling traffic, shelters park benches, and renders the communal dimension more intimate without interrupting the ground plane or obstructing the facades’ rhythm beyond.

*Top image scanned from Leonardo Benevolo's The History of the City, pg. 655

ronchamp, notre dame du haut

Playing my Corbusian cards like they’re going out of [international] style, I visited Ronchamp today. I intended to spend half a day there and half a day at a canal lock he designed—what with trying to stay within my fundamental underlying initial infrastructural framework and all—but there was only one bus to the lock at noon, sans return. So I was proud to dedicate a day to the chapel, which turned out a fitting move on account of its richness and relatively remote location. I’m showing the chapel in its classic contrapposto here because it encapsulates several features in one go . . . and because it was one of the few sunny photographs managed to snatch. At the same time, it strikes me that such a faux-totalizing view tends to construe the masterpiece as more of a toadstool or clog-stand, dispensing with the roving complexity that marks its true genius. There is a lot to this building that the photograph doesn’t show, and even if I couldn’t see it (said with brow-furrowed gravitas), I at least got to take a gander.

firminy, firminy-vert

I paid a visit to Corbusier’s Firminy complex—about 45 minutes outside of Lyon by regional train—and spent most of my time out of the rain in the church of Saint Pierre, which was begun in 1961 and only completed in 2006. I was suitably awed. As always in a Corbusian construction, I caught frequent whiffs of his students…this time most strongly Koolhaas and Miralles. The concrete’s modern smoothness only enhanced the intended effect and rendered the project that much more relevant to a contemporary architectural sensibility. Brightly colored daylighting and sculpturally canted prisms puncture a deceptively complex curvilinear cavern, which in turn envelopes a raised ground constantly evolving between topography and floorscape as one processes around and through. I’m including an interior and exterior view here, with the incising green lightbox as a hinge between the two.